JoJo's Blog- Peek into my Life

Asian Crisis....Language Network

Today in class we discussed how the example given in “Linked” of the Asian financial crisis. Well just as I have written about in previous blogs topics from other classes always seem to overlap. The book did not go into any details bout the situation so I would like to share what I think I got out of my International Relations class that addressed the same issue. This way I may actually get a better understanding of it myself. Basically Asia was being praised for its economic success especially when compared to Latin America so when they had their crisis it seemed as if it happened out of the blue. While Latin America had an import substitution strategy Asia’s growth was export led. This difference seemed to be making all the difference. Anyhow private companies in Asia were borrowing short-term, low interest loans in dollars. The private markets in Asia were taking on debts from government controlled banks. Since they did not have the finances to pay the money back when needed they resulted to transferring balances since other banks kept offering loans. This went on for a while so know one could tell Asia was getting into trouble. The problem was that all of a sudden the banks stopped offering them loans and they had to pay everyone back at the same time. As a result, Asia suffered a liquidity crisis since they would have been able to service later they just at that moment did not have the money. The IMF is blamed for having exacerbated the situation since Asia did not start off in such a terrible situation but because of the banks pulling out without warning there was nothing they could do. I find it necessary to provide a disclaimer because that is what I understood from the lecture today but I could be way off so excuse any inaccuracies. If you can better explain the phenomenon feel free to do so when posting your comment because I really need to know what I am talking about since it will probably be on the final. Thanks in advance.
Another topic brought up in discussion was to name other networks that have not been brought up. Religion possibly could be a scale-free network since individual languages could be the nodes and Latin could be the hub since it connects so many different languages. There are hundreds of languages in Africa alone and even though one African group may be unable to understand another group there are similarities throughout a few. Going back to Latin it connects Italian, French Spanish, and Portuguese, among others. Even though Latin is considered a dead language since people do not speak it if all the languages with Latin influence no longer had it there would be major differences. English has numerous Latin words especially in the medical field and they simplify knowing the definitions of the words by knowing what the Latin part means. All the languages that were connected by a hub such as Latin would no longer be connected. It would probably be a bit more difficult to learn different languages if you cannot recognize similarities that exist because of the shared origin.